Universalism and the Exclusivity of Christ
There is no other Redeemer, no other Savior, no other hope, and in that we rejoice and proclaim Him. This message is the gospel; it is truly good news. God has sent His Son in history to find and save sinners, to pay the debts we owed, to face the punishment we deserved, and to forgive—to bring rebels into His family.
It had been a remarkable few days for the Apostle Peter, which had followed a remarkable month and several remarkable years. He had found himself preaching to thousands, with three thousand responding in faith to his preaching. Every day seemingly brought wonderful new opportunities. A man unable to walk from birth was healed in the name of Jesus Christ. The people were astounded, and Peter took the opportunity again to open his mouth and preach. The religious leaders were not enamored of Peter’s message. They were greatly annoyed and had Peter arrested. The rulers, the elders, and the scribes wanted to know: “What right and what authority have you got to be speaking the way you do?” Again, Peter found his voice and declared to them: “There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.” There was astonishment on the part of the religious leaders, but they warned Peter and John to speak no more of this man. They were to keep the only message of salvation to themselves (Acts 2:1–4:22).
The world hasn’t changed. Few things are more offensive to people than the belief that there is no salvation apart from faith in Christ. We’ve all heard people say, “There are many ways up the mountain to God; we all take different paths” or “What really matters is that you are sincere.” In the culture of which I am a part, people believe in “justification by death.” All you have to do is die, and somehow you are ushered into a better place. There is an unthinking assumption of relativistic pluralism, that all religions are basically the same and that we shouldn’t take any of them too seriously.
Tragically, there are those who call themselves Christians, even in churches, who would believe that the one God worshiped by us is the same Lord worshiped in different ways by Buddhists, Hindus, and Muslims. From our earliest days, our culture tells us that we’ve all got a book, all got a symbol, all got a special day. All religions are the same.
It is helpful for us to think about what we believe about the Lord Jesus Christ in relation to these challenges. We believe that He is the Son of God, the Messiah promised in the Old Testament, born of a virgin; He lived a sinless life, was crucified on the cross, was buried, and on the third day rose again to life forevermore. Without these things, we do not have Christianity. Jews are insistent that Jesus was not the Messiah, and they believe that they are still awaiting their Messiah. Islam declares that Jesus didn’t die on the cross and that the claim that Jesus of Nazareth was the Son of God is blasphemous. At its very core, Christianity is completely incompatible with these other religions.
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How Is Jesus “‘Everlasting Father”?
Isaiah’s basic meaning is that the Messiah will be fatherly in his love and concern for the people of God. He will care for the household of God just as a righteous and devoted Israelite dad would look after his children.
There is one passage that each of us will hear a dozen times over Christmas: ‘For unto us a child is born, for unto us a Son is given…And he shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace’ (Is. 9:6). There is a puzzle in this verse that a lot of Christians never pause to figure out. What does it mean that Jesus is ‘Everlasting Father’? Most Christians with a basic understanding of the gospel can make sense of Jesus being Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, and Prince of Peace. These labels fit well with our understanding of the story of redemption. Yet, Jesus being called ‘father’ does not square with how we typically think about the Savior. How do we make sense of this unusual title for the Messiah?
Avoiding Confusion
A good starting point is to recognise that when Isaiah refers to the Christ as ‘father’ he does not mean that the eternal Son of God is ‘father’ in relation to the first person of the Trinity. Before God the Father, Jesus is the eternally begotten Son. In the old language of the creeds, the Father is not the Son and the Son is not the Father.
Having side-stepped this confusion, we are now in a better place to understand the text. Isaiah’s basic meaning is that the Messiah will be fatherly in his love and concern for the people of God. He will care for the household of God just as a righteous and devoted Israelite dad would look after his children.
So far, so good. Yet, this just leads to a further question. How would Isaiah have understood the roles and responsibilities of a pious father? To answer this question a little Old Testament background is required.
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The Image of God and the Difference It Makes
The truth is, we were created to worship. We were born to worship. We are all religious beings because we all seek to worship. Writes Tripp: “In this way every human being is religious, because we all are made in God’s image and wired with Godward capacities, and we will either give ourselves in worship to God or we will worship something that God has made. Every human being is searching for God, though most don’t know it.”
One of the core doctrines of biblical faith is that of our creation in the image and likeness of God. This is such a vital core belief and one that distinguishes our faith from most other religions. It has ramifications for why we are here, how we live, how we treat others, and how we relate to our Creator.
Paul Tripp’s very helpful recent book Do You Believe? (Crossway, 2021) examines 12 key biblical doctrines. I have already written articles looking at some of them, and this is now my fourth in this informal series. As with the other doctrines, Tripp offers two chapters on each: one doctrinal and one application.
Early on in the first of his two chapters on this key biblical doctrine, he says this:
“Like God” is an amazing thing to declare. “Made in his image” is a profound announcement. But these are the things God immediately declares upon creating Adam and Eve. In those words he is defining their identity and the utter uniqueness of their relationship to him. Adam and Eve are not just part of the catalog of creatures that God made. They are above, they are special, and they are christened with a dignity that separates them from everything else. We must not ever forget this foundational definition of who human beings are. With these words God names the intrinsic worth of people. This worth is never earned and cannot be taken away. To be human is to have dignity and worth because you carry the image of God himself. 230-231
He reminds us that none of this has to do with our choices, accomplishments, successes, or actions. We have overwhelming value simply because of the fact that we are made in God’s image. He spends time looking at the usual list of things this entails, such as being relational creatures and moral creatures.
But we are also worshipping creatures, and what he says about this is worth spending a bit of time on. The truth is, we were created to worship. We were born to worship. We are all religious beings because we all seek to worship. Writes Tripp:
In this way every human being is religious, because we all are made in God’s image and wired with Godward capacities, and we will either give ourselves in worship to God or we will worship something that God has made. Every human being is searching for God, though most don’t know it. Much of human disappointment, despondency, anger and hopelessness exist because we ask something to do for us what only God can do. Because we are spiritual beings, we name things as ‘god’ that are not God. Because we are worshippers, we will always hook our hopes and dreams to something. Wired with imaginations, we envision what life will be like, calculating if this “god” will come through for us….
Detached from God, our spirituality drives us into various forms of functional insanity. Careening from god to god and from disappointment to disappointment, we attach ourselves to yet another created thing and hope once again it will do for us what it can never do. We put godlike expectations on one another, and we break under the burden. We keep hoping creation will do what it simply has no capacity to do for us, and that it will offer what God alone can. 237-238
All of the abilities we have as humans – the ability to think, feel, communicate, etc – are orientated toward the worship of God. But sin destroys and distorts all this. Tripp continues:
Divorced from God, these capacities can go dark and become dangerous. Sadly, in our sin, we often use these abilities to manipulate, seduce, and oppress others. 238
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Good Governance Begins with Knowledge
God gives us rules in society for our own good. Men are to be men, women are to be women, and kings are to be kings, and servants are to be servants. There is no denying that this is the natural order of things. We remember that the Ten Commandments are not a response to sin, but are the very character of the Lord laid out for us to follow and be conformed to. If we would stand in authority over the law then we have become a law unto ourselves.
We are going to do something a little bit different today for our look at the Larger Catechism. In the act of taking questions out of order it may seem as if we are doing violence to the original intent of the writers. If they wanted to keep the scope and the definition of the fifth command together they would of done so. Why should I feel the right to divide them? It’s a good inquiry worthy of an explanation. Simply put the breaking up of a multi-year look of 196 questions is going to mean that some decisions will be necessary in order to better explain the totality of the purpose of the Christian religion for believers and unbelievers alike. When it comes to this part of the law some terms are going to be used that are wildly foreign to the way we talk today, for good or for ill. Any conversation that gets into hierarchy, roles, and place is going to receive some pushback, since nearly all of our agencies and corporations operate with a strict conception of egalitarianism, that is that men, women, children, etc… are equal in such a way that any talk of difference is seen as demeaning or derogatory. Yet, we will see that the Bible is anti-egalitarian in a number of important ways.
In our walk through these three catechism questions we’ll see a couple of things that will neuter any conversation that the WLC is in any way making ontological statements about worth or value, one to another. However, what we will notice is that God has a purpose in not only making us different, but giving each of us unique roles to play in His kingdom. Our faith is patriarchal and it is so because God is God and we are not. Let’s get into the Q/A’s so we can talk more:
Q. 123. Which is the fifth commandment?
A. The fifth commandment is, Honor thy father and thy mother: that thy days be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.
Q. 124. Who are meant by father and mother in the fifth commandment?
A. By father and mother, in the fifth commandment, are meant, not only natural parents, but all superiors in age and gifts; and especially such as, by God’s ordinance, are over us in place of authority, whether in family, church, or commonwealth.
Q. 126. What is the general scope of the fifth commandment?
A. The general scope of the fifth commandment is, the performance of those duties which we mutually owe in our several relations, as inferiors, superiors, or equals.
As you can probably tell from the middle of the three questions there are some assumptions made about the way God made the world that need defined.
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